The following discussion of the background to the invention is intended to facilitate an understanding of the present invention. However, it should be appreciated that the discussion is not an acknowledgment or admission that any of the material referred to was published, known or part of the common general knowledge in any jurisdiction as at the priority date of the application.
Existing systems for monitoring virtual environments monitor the usage of critical central processing unit (“CPU”), memory and storage resources of the physical machine and characteristics of the individual virtual machines as seen from the physical machine. These latter characteristics are measured from the operating system running on the physical machine and, since they are made from outside the virtual machine concerned, are referred to in this specification as the “outside view”. Using the outside view, it is possible to determine the resource usage levels of the operating system of the physical machine and the individual usage levels for each of the virtual machines.
The problem with such systems is that “outside” view information alone does not provide a complete view of the operations of the data network. Without this complete view, effective capacity planning decisions regarding the data network may not be made through ignorance of other constraining factors. Additionally, without a complete view of the operations of the data network, accurately identifying problems with the virtual machine environment of the data network is almost impossible.
To elaborate, because each virtual machine operates as an individual process on the operating system of the physical machine, but internally operates a complete operating system with individual applications, errors in one virtual machine may be propagating errors in other virtual machines. For example, if a process on one of the virtual machines starts to take up excessive CPU cycles of the physical machine this would starve other virtual machines of the limited CPU cycles available on the physical machine, resulting in application slow-downs on all the virtual machines.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to overcome or at least minimise the impact of the aforementioned problems by providing an additional “inside view” of the performance of the virtual machines on the data network.
An optional secondary object of the present invention is to reduce the number of programs required by the monitoring system to obtain both the “inside view” and the “outside view” of each virtual machine. In this manner, the amount of resources consumed by the monitoring system can be minimised. Additionally, having a reduced number of agents monitoring multiple virtual machines and/or physical machines significantly reduces the overall maintenance required by the monitoring system as a whole.